The assumption is that governments (and the people supporting it) assume mass surveillance keeps people 100% safe. That is not necessarily the case, anything higher then 0% if you disregard social costs is a win in their view.
Then they should publish annual or quarterly reports detailing their counter-terrorism ops and how many terrorist attacks they foiled thanks to the surveillance and smart data algorithms and how many they failed to avert and why that happened and who are responsible for the fiasco and what measures to be taken in the future to avoid this outcome, you know a true and functioning democracy in a free society.
Why do you say their purpose is to only pretend to fail? Governments have very little incentive to succeed in many areas. Terrorism appears to be much like regular crime in that if there is little, the government is lauded, and if there is a lot, the government is given more money and power to fight it.
*edit: I do not mean to say that government officials were willfully negligent; they have been given an impossible task, and their jobs depend on believing that a little more money and power will allow them to succeed.
I don't think we need complicated conspiracy theories that demonise intelligence workers to explain this sort of narrative. There's now a group of people whose job is to use bulk data intercept to predict and stop crimes before they happen, essentially a Minority Report but real (they do other things too, but let's ignore that for now).
As no group of people can be 100% effective, they will always occasionally fail even if they succeed most of the time, and when they do their explanation for their own failure will always be "we needed more". And they will truly believe that! No secret agenda needed. From their POV it's the only answer they can possibly give.
I fully expect in the coming weeks to learn (shock) that the terrorists had Facebook accounts, used WhatsApp, searched on Google, used iPhones and the DGCE will undoubtably claim that if they had access to all those things the plot could have been detected earlier and stopped. What else are they gonna say? "Whoops, our bad"?
I completely agree with all of your points, and did not mean to imply that governments caused these attacks, or were willfully negligent. I apologize if I did not express this in my previous post.
I don't think we need complicated conspiracy theories that demonise intelligence workers to explain this sort of narrative. There's now a group of people whose job is to use bulk data intercept to predict and stop crimes before they happen, essentially a Minority Report but real (they do other things too, but let's ignore that for now).
As no group of people can be 100% effective, they will always occasionally fail even if they succeed most of the time, and when they do their explanation for their own failure will always be "we needed more". And they will truly believe that! No secret agenda needed. From their POV it's the only answer they can possibly give.
I fully expect in the coming weeks to learn (shock) that the terrorists had Facebook accounts, used WhatsApp, searched on Google, used iPhones and the DGCE will undoubtably claim that if they had access to all those things the plot could have been detected earlier and stopped. What else are they gonna say? "Whoops, our bad"?
I hear on the news from time to time that terrorist attacks in my country are stopped from time to time thanks to surveillance systems, I guess it's the same for France, so I don't see what the problem is.
If you've ever seen the spies running those programs you'll understand why it happened. They look and act much like the terrorists. Drunk on power with a feeling of invincibility (e.g. sociopaths).
The argument shouldn't be that mass surveillance doesn't work. It clearly does something or they wouldn't want it. The point is that even if it does work, we shouldn't do it because it goes against our values. Freedom has a price.
There is currently no law for mass surveillance in France, and the soon to be voted laws are the application of lawful wire phone tap to the 21 century : IMSI catcher and computer spyware
Riding the public interest wave about the attacks in Paris makes making click-bait easier than ever!
Additionally the article can be summarized as: "We don't know how the attacks were co-ordinated... so maybe strong encryption, and by proxy, Snowden, are to blame?"
Well, a tweet from a former press secretary of a US president. I'd say it's pretty news-worthy, since this seems to be a coordinated campaign by some (albeit a disgusting one).
It's probably more germane that she makes a living on Fox News, hosting a show that more or less spends it's time pandering to a segment of the American population that is afraid of everything (I don't mean Republicans or the right wing of American politics, I mean the people who watch "The Five"...). It's not entirely clear to me if the hosts themselves are afraid of everything or simply effective in their cynicism.
Many of the people orchestrating it have probably been pining for this for years. Insinuations like "When the next attack comes, maybe some people will start to think differently about these leaks" was in the talking points from the start.
This is expected response if you follow the American media.
There is a very interesting video [0] of Noam Chomsky, after the 9/11 attacks, where he
says that any government and regime worth it's salt will use 9/11 as an excuse to
push their agenda over the public.
And they will do so using their fear.
[0] <For the life of me, I couldn't locate the video. Will update the post if I do.>
Perhaps 9/11 allowed the bureaucracy to push its agenda, but it is very clear that it took Bush completely off his plan; Bush campaigned for a less activist foreign policy (which many criticized as being isolationist).
How often do you think a politicians campaign platform represents their actual intentions. You should read about the project for a new american century.
10 of 25 signing members of PNAC were high level bush administration workers. PNAC was explicitly neoconservative and most definitely wanted to be involved in more wars abroad.
I have come to believe that most politicians believe their platforms and campaign speeches. This may sound difficult to believe given all the doublespeak, contradictions, and fallacies they recite on the campaign trail, but it is the simplest way to explain how they can keep up all these strange ideas while encountering challenging questions, tough situations and dilemmas.
It seems to me that just as the NBA is full of (some of) the tallest people in the country, the Congress and White House are full of the people who are most capable of believing whatever they have to at any given moment.
IIRC the Bush administration had planned to invade Iraq regardless of 9/11. The US Department of Defense had placed the final documents on Bush's desk (ready for him to sign) 48 hours prior to the fall of the first tower. So really, 9/11 gave Bush a convenient excuse to do what he was going to do anyway.
The rationale was that Hussein needed to be replaced. Iraq was too unstable and it might fall to Iran, which would upset the power balance in the middle east. I think Afghanistan was thrown in as an afterthought because, you know, "terrorists".
> (CNN) -- The Bush administration began planning to use U.S. troops to invade Iraq within days after the former Texas governor entered the White House three years ago, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told CBS News' 60 Minutes.
> "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill told CBS, according to excerpts released Saturday by the network. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap."
> He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. "There are memos. One of them marked, secret, says, 'Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,'" adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of 2001
> Based on his interviews with O'Neill and several other officials at the meetings, Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq's oil wealth.
For reference, the towers fell on Sept 11, 2001.
For the rationale my understanding mostly derives from various reddit threads (e.g. [1]), a friend who majored in criminology, and this fantastic overview of Iraq at Wait but Why [2].
> From this standpoint, the most important of the week’s revelations was the report by NBC News that Bush had on his desk September 9—two days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—a National Security Presidential Directive outlining in detail a worldwide campaign of military, diplomatic and intelligence action targeting Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization, including the delivery of an ultimatum to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, backed by the threat of war.
UPDATE: Incidentally, my search led me to a Guardian article which claims that a plan to "escalate pressure on the Taliban to surrender Bin Laden to he US" had existed as far back as the Clinton administration. This is new to me.
Yea, Snowden is responsible. Because we never knew about phone monitoring before?? Glad the terrorists never watched the wire or any other police procedural going back to the 70's.
Interferometry on the microwave background allows the U.S. military to track all people, weapons, and aqueous objects bigger than a thimble throughout an entire city such as Paris.
Advanced technologies allow them to know when these things are brewing, but per game theory they allow them to happen to not reveal that capability.
Encryption and Snowden have nothing to do with it. They are limited hangouts to gaslight and decrease the power of the lower echelons of government (you know, the regular people who might actually have stopped this).
Osama Bin Laden avoided electronic communication well before the NSA's illegal domestic spying activities were revealed. He passed notes and relied on trusted couriers. This is nothing but political opportunism.
Right, but did that rigor go down to the field? Unlikely that his rigor would percolate all the way down, however with it now being common knowledge rather than paranoia most anyone downstream would also observe the same paranoia due to the revelations.
Snowden just provided the proof. It was already common knowledge that the government had massive communications monitoring programs. They were building an enormous data center, and previous programs had been uncovered.
It was not common knowledge and even those who were paranoid typically were sloppy with their implementations, but given they know they are targeted and the tools since developed to counteract this new reality, now rigorous communications security is easy, no special knowledge required.
Lots of people talked about it and were dismissed as tin foil hat wearers. Likewise RMS has warned about a lot of stuff that slowly seems to be coming a reality, yet he is still dismissed as a bit of a nutter.
Closing borders isn't going to help if you have thousands of people who have no future and who are looking for revenge out of frustration. This is not to blame anyone, but it's more a matter of fact. Paris has seen many riots in the past years, where hundreds of cars have been destroyed by these people. It's not surprise that you can find some people in that group that are vulnerable or attracted to the tactics of IS.
Germany partially suspended registration of refugees, the head of one of the parties in government is on record saying that currently about 40-50% of them are not even registered at all.
First we lose our friends, then we'll lose our privacy? I was horrified by the reaction of some of my acquaintances back home in France: "Let's imprison all those who went to Syria", "We should forbid Tor if this is what those terrorists used to kill our people", and the now classic "if you don't do anything wrong, you shouldn't have anything to hide".
While I'm emotional thinking of those who were killed and their loved ones, realistically this attack is not a credible threat to France.
I hope the government lets the state of emergency expire doesn't lower itself to the level of these criminals by taking any further action to undermine justice.
Why shouldn't we imprison those who went to Syria to fight? They were fighting for the enemy, so they could be charged with treason, but even if not they could be charged with war crimes.
Unless I missunderstood the question and they wanted to imprison all those who have been in Syria.
The same happens with my Israeli friends whenever there is an incident or uprising in their country. Pacifists become suddenly rabid and call for blood. Its scary, but perhaps a natural impulse.
French nationals are forbidden to fight for a foreign entity, or to train for a terrorist group like ISIS, and there is prison sentences for it, your acquaintances are just lecturing you on the french laws.
Well, some argue that if not the war itself then some of the decisions made by the US in Iraq in the aftermath of the war helped forming ISIS, such as, dismantling the Iraqi army [1].
> I blame Bush for declaring war in the middle east for what happened in Paris. Not Edward Snowden.
Wait, what? It's been almost seven years since Bush left office. 100% of the blame rests on the men who donned suicide vests and massacred innocent Parisians. It doesn't matter how horrific US foreign policy is. Responding by killing a bunch of French civilians is not even remotely reasonable. Seriously, how does someone go from "US foreign policy killed my countrymen" to "let's slaughter random French people"?
Rationally predicting that N people will try to do terrible things is definitely not the same as condoning the people who have done terrible things [aside: this emotive conflation may partly explain why western media are serially unable to analyze or reflect on the root causes of terrible events].
Predicting that the civil wars in Iraq and Syria would give a fertile ground for extremism to develop is no leap, and certainly doesn't condone it, and focusing on the guilt of specific extremists in each case won't teach us anything either.
7 year?
Do you understand geopolitical consequences has time interval
? you invade a country , okay? you should expect whole generation of terrorist who want you dead not tomorrow , 20 year later . 7 year I would say is so small time in things like these.
Note: I'm replying to myself because superuser2 deleted his comment just before I finished mine[1]. I put a decent amount of effort into my reply, so I'd rather not let it go to waste.
> I don't know. Let's ask President Obama why he bombed a hospital and gunned down survivors as they ran away.
Western foreign policy kills innocent people. Sometimes they're angry enough about it to kill you right back.
If you're talking about the Kunduz incident, your statement is absurd. Obama didn't know about the airstrike until afterwards. More importantly: US forces didn't intend to kill civilians. They mistakenly believed the building was being used by Taliban to fire upon coalition forces. It was a huge fuck-up. There is a big investigation. People will probably go to jail over it. Everyone involved agrees it's a tragedy.
Now contrast that to the Paris attacks. These deaths weren't an accident or collateral damage. The fanatics intended to kill as many innocent civilians as possible. They would have killed more if they'd had the ability to do so.
And notice the difference in reactions. After the hospital bombing, no Americans celebrated in the streets. Even the most hawkish politicians expressed their sadness at the tragedy. If you read Obama's statement, it's nothing but apologetic.[2] Now read the Islamic State's statement on the Paris attacks.[3] They praise the attackers and promise more to come. The two sides cannot be more different. You should feel ashamed for your equivocation.
> Responding by killing a bunch of French civilians is not even remotely reasonable
I agree, as was the US dropping the A Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Not even remotely reasonable" especially when the victims numbered in the tens of thousands. Innocent women and children included.
Before Snowden came along no terrorist ever heard of electronic surveillance, right?
If anything, mass surveillance is to blame for lack of intel. Before spying was so ubiquitous, terrorists might have said something on the phone or by email.
Ok, (edit: not new. Idk why I said new.) New conspiracy theory: the attacks were allowed to happen (not intentionally caused, just allowed to happen, or perhaps just not worked quite as hard to prevent) in order to get public support for further government powers.
It's known that governments have had plans as to how to get support from a tragedy if one happens. Is it that far fetched that preventing tragedies which are more likely but have a benefit to them for the government, would be considered at a somewhat lower priority than one which is less likely, but does not have any side benefit for the government?
Now, I'm not claiming that this is the case, not really, but it is something that comes to mind, and the most likely version of it does not seem that absurd?
As another commenter mentioned, that's an old conspiracy theory. It's already being discussed in the press (see link below). It's problematic that even when you have a growing surveillance state, the state has less incentive to act to protect or attempt to prevent attacks on "soft targets" ie: the public at large even when they have solid information supporting an imminent attack. Or worded a bit more strongly, a state hoping to garner support for more sweeping anti-civil liberties measures has an incentive to allow such attacks to happen even when they could be prevented.
As a practical matter of how this could occur, a small group of intelligence analysts could selectively withhold important information from decision makers, or decision makers could selectively ignore key pieces of information. Either can get you the result of allowing an attack while leaving plausible excuses as to why it wasn't deliberate.
So we fight for liberty and privacy but blame the ones that risk their lives bringing it. I fear these attacks will convince everyone that mass surveillance is a necessary thing.
Surprisingly, you only need a few terrorists to change international laws and double those military budgets. Snowden or not, it's the virus that comes first and the anti-virus after. I don't think any mass surveillance program can stop such actions unless you become a militia state which I highly doubt (and hope not) will ever happen.
It's barely been twelve hours - too soon for the results of any real investigation to have influenced the editorials coming out. What we're hearing is the positions that were prepared prior to the attacks themselves.
It's possible that the perpetrators evaded surveillance with encryption. It's also possible that the perpetrators did have their phones tapped, but investigators dropped the ball. It's possible that they avoided phones and did all their planning in person. It's even possible that someone made an executive decision to not intervene and stop them, for political reasons.
As far as I know, none of Snowden's criticisms have been addressed at French organizations. While there's some possibility US intelligence agencies could have picked up on this, it's primarily a European matter and not the NSA's responsibility. This makes Snowden's having undermined the NSA quite unlikely to have been relevant.
When the article says:
> In response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks that hit Paris in January of 2015, France adopted one of the most aggressive surveillance laws in the Western world. That was not enough to stop these attacks.
That's very misleading, as the law was just voted and isn't in application yet.
All the reactions are just existing positions being repeated. The NSA fans attack Snowden. The gun nuts blame gun control. The tech crowd criticizes surveillance. And all throughout, almost no information about the actual events is available.
Eye-witnesses report trained soldiers in uniforms that then were allowed to escape.
This is a false flag attack that serves a number of purposes. Slowing the push for encryption and generally boosting surveillance and domestic operations is one. As the western debt grows and the military position becomes thinner, it will become increasingly difficult to maintain the fiat that demands massive resource distribution imbalances. This will lead to serious shortages in western countries. In order to maintain power, the state turns its guns and spies inward.
But in the meantime the covert operations in Syria have not been completely successful, and since they need to do Syria before Iran (as has been planned for many years) they need to move to overt operations. This requires the propaganda to motivate it which needs a real event behind it.
I'm only comforted by the fact that there's really nothing any government can do to stop crypto. The technology has become simple enough that anybody can encrypt their communications or files with open-source software, and that's basically impossible to stop.
They can criminalize it, so that only criminals use crypto by definition. Think about tor. As a fraction of network traffic, almost no one uses it, so if you do you have singled yourself out.
Running an exit node is already a great way to end up in jail, and I would not have a warm fuzzy feeling about using tor for innocent traffic at this point, although it's perfectly legal.
Imagine how easily flagged users could be singled out if simply using crypto were a crime, and probable cause for search: e.g. you get caught using FDE on your phone or laptop at a traffic stop or the airport. Either your info is trivially purused at will by LE, or you've committed a crime by makeing it difficult and can be compelled on that basis. Either way, they're reading your mail if they feel like it.
The real value of this would be that almost no normal person would want to risk prosecution, so the overwhelming majority of user data could be easily mined. These are just a couple of crypto tools, but the technical details don't really matter here, I think this is a legal and social strategy that will generalize well, and it I think this is where we're inevitably headed.
Your game theory is accurate, but I think your systems design understanding is lacking.
We will have an extremely difficult time making all crypto illegal. Cryptography is crucial to important pieces of infrastructure we use for trust and security.
We may reach the point where certain implementation or tools are outlawed. In which case people with stuff to hide will piggyback it inside legal tools.
I suspect we will be more likely to see a combination of these approaches:
1) Forcing entities that sell products that provide encryption capabilities to maintain access for the government.
2) Pass laws that make it illegal to avoid or materially assist others in avoiding government surveillance without authorization
Much terrorism is an externality of Western foreign policy and a nation's abuse of it's citizens (domestic).
Whether Snowden or encryption enabled terrorism or not is TOTALLY missing or deflecting the real conversation that should be occurring. Do not fall into the trap of arguing. Ignore statements like OA. Instead ask "Why are people willing to kill themselves and others?" "What has France done / is doing so that people believe that is their best redress?" "Why do people become terrorists?". Most import of all (and the only way we will end terrorism). "How can we change the world so less people are compelled to such drastic action?"
I this "western foreign policy" plays a complex role, some of it has been negative. In some cases, like Iraq, it is more a failure of that policy that has had a negative effect.
However, I think this features far too prominently in a lot of people's outlooks than it should. Nothing, including terrorism is born in a vacuum but I don't think American involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts is the primary cause. Various Tsarist policies at the turn of the century are responsible for the conditions that gave rise to revolutionary communism in Russia, but communism was a greater force than Tsarist policies.
We are talking about a spectrum of religious-nationalist beliefs that are turning other wars, conflicts, slights, frustrations, rivalries and any other available fuel and putting it to use. This includes American policies in Iraq. They are fuelling it, but I really do not think they are creating it.
102 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] thread>Our Governments: "We spy on all of you to keep you safe". But why have your mass surveillance systems failed to prevent the Paris attacks?
1. We need this tool to stop terrorists. if you don't give up liberty for safety, the terrorists win.
2. (Inevitable terror attack happens)
3. Our tools weren't strong enough to stop the terrorists. We need _more_ tools and a larger mandate to stop them.
I've been told that, due to the above cycle, we should all realize that the primary purpose of government is to pretend to fail.
*edit: I do not mean to say that government officials were willfully negligent; they have been given an impossible task, and their jobs depend on believing that a little more money and power will allow them to succeed.
As no group of people can be 100% effective, they will always occasionally fail even if they succeed most of the time, and when they do their explanation for their own failure will always be "we needed more". And they will truly believe that! No secret agenda needed. From their POV it's the only answer they can possibly give.
I fully expect in the coming weeks to learn (shock) that the terrorists had Facebook accounts, used WhatsApp, searched on Google, used iPhones and the DGCE will undoubtably claim that if they had access to all those things the plot could have been detected earlier and stopped. What else are they gonna say? "Whoops, our bad"?
As no group of people can be 100% effective, they will always occasionally fail even if they succeed most of the time, and when they do their explanation for their own failure will always be "we needed more". And they will truly believe that! No secret agenda needed. From their POV it's the only answer they can possibly give.
I fully expect in the coming weeks to learn (shock) that the terrorists had Facebook accounts, used WhatsApp, searched on Google, used iPhones and the DGCE will undoubtably claim that if they had access to all those things the plot could have been detected earlier and stopped. What else are they gonna say? "Whoops, our bad"?
Additionally the article can be summarized as: "We don't know how the attacks were co-ordinated... so maybe strong encryption, and by proxy, Snowden, are to blame?"
Tangentially related: https://theintercept.com/2015/09/11/today-14th-anniversary-e...
There is a very interesting video [0] of Noam Chomsky, after the 9/11 attacks, where he says that any government and regime worth it's salt will use 9/11 as an excuse to push their agenda over the public.
And they will do so using their fear.
[0] <For the life of me, I couldn't locate the video. Will update the post if I do.>
0: http://rethink911.org/ 1: http://www.globalresearch.ca/twenty-six-things-about-the-isl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
10 of 25 signing members of PNAC were high level bush administration workers. PNAC was explicitly neoconservative and most definitely wanted to be involved in more wars abroad.
It seems to me that just as the NBA is full of (some of) the tallest people in the country, the Congress and White House are full of the people who are most capable of believing whatever they have to at any given moment.
When that amount of money and power is at stake, there's no room for people who are earnest.
The rationale was that Hussein needed to be replaced. Iraq was too unstable and it might fall to Iran, which would upset the power balance in the middle east. I think Afghanistan was thrown in as an afterthought because, you know, "terrorists".
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/10/oneill.bush/
> (CNN) -- The Bush administration began planning to use U.S. troops to invade Iraq within days after the former Texas governor entered the White House three years ago, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told CBS News' 60 Minutes.
> "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill told CBS, according to excerpts released Saturday by the network. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap."
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bush-sought-way-to-invade-iraq/
> He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. "There are memos. One of them marked, secret, says, 'Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,'" adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of 2001
> Based on his interviews with O'Neill and several other officials at the meetings, Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq's oil wealth.
For reference, the towers fell on Sept 11, 2001.
For the rationale my understanding mostly derives from various reddit threads (e.g. [1]), a friend who majored in criminology, and this fantastic overview of Iraq at Wait but Why [2].
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bush+iraq+invasion+before+9%2F11
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1lx1s7/oil_pl...
[2] http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story...
> The US Department of Defense had placed the final documents on Bush's desk (ready for him to sign) 48 hours prior to the fall of the first tower.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/05/bush-m18.html
> From this standpoint, the most important of the week’s revelations was the report by NBC News that Bush had on his desk September 9—two days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—a National Security Presidential Directive outlining in detail a worldwide campaign of military, diplomatic and intelligence action targeting Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization, including the delivery of an ultimatum to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, backed by the threat of war.
UPDATE: Incidentally, my search led me to a Guardian article which claims that a plan to "escalate pressure on the Taliban to surrender Bin Laden to he US" had existed as far back as the Clinton administration. This is new to me.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/mar/24/september11.usa...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh5r3G7Oy40
Advanced technologies allow them to know when these things are brewing, but per game theory they allow them to happen to not reveal that capability.
Encryption and Snowden have nothing to do with it. They are limited hangouts to gaslight and decrease the power of the lower echelons of government (you know, the regular people who might actually have stopped this).
And you know about them.....how? If you haven't realized, I'm asking you to provide a source for these extraordinary claims.
The NSA had bin laden's sat-phone line in the 90s. I've seen documentaries on it.
Snowden confirmed the extent of NSA surveillance in 2013.
So that's 12 years for which the GP's statement was true.
France has porous borders. They spent $1 BILLION over the past year on security "enhancements".
If evil people want to be evil, they are going to find a way.
(http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/spd-chef-gabriel-40-...)
Supposedly, this is not a problem - even though it is people from the country where ISIS terrorists operate.
At the same time, we have a continuous push for and actually new surveillance laws such as the dreaded 'Vorratsdatenspeicherung'.
That doesn't really fit together at all anymore...
First we lose our friends, then we'll lose our privacy? I was horrified by the reaction of some of my acquaintances back home in France: "Let's imprison all those who went to Syria", "We should forbid Tor if this is what those terrorists used to kill our people", and the now classic "if you don't do anything wrong, you shouldn't have anything to hide".
What's next?
I hope the government lets the state of emergency expire doesn't lower itself to the level of these criminals by taking any further action to undermine justice.
Ban Internet because terrorists use it to communicate.
Unless I missunderstood the question and they wanted to imprison all those who have been in Syria.
You could certainly do that on the basis of membership of a proscribed organisation, but...
> They were fighting for the enemy
Which enemy is that? The USA and UK are not currently at war with anyone in a legal sense.
It makes me sad to read such things, especially from the tech-crowd.
Note how the government also uses times like these to rush through new policies around privacy.
Did phone tapping stop the US from preventing 9/11? No.
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/did-george-w-bush-cr...
https://twitter.com/LatuffCartoons/status/665541417763123200
Wait, what? It's been almost seven years since Bush left office. 100% of the blame rests on the men who donned suicide vests and massacred innocent Parisians. It doesn't matter how horrific US foreign policy is. Responding by killing a bunch of French civilians is not even remotely reasonable. Seriously, how does someone go from "US foreign policy killed my countrymen" to "let's slaughter random French people"?
Predicting that the civil wars in Iraq and Syria would give a fertile ground for extremism to develop is no leap, and certainly doesn't condone it, and focusing on the guilt of specific extremists in each case won't teach us anything either.
> I don't know. Let's ask President Obama why he bombed a hospital and gunned down survivors as they ran away. Western foreign policy kills innocent people. Sometimes they're angry enough about it to kill you right back.
If you're talking about the Kunduz incident, your statement is absurd. Obama didn't know about the airstrike until afterwards. More importantly: US forces didn't intend to kill civilians. They mistakenly believed the building was being used by Taliban to fire upon coalition forces. It was a huge fuck-up. There is a big investigation. People will probably go to jail over it. Everyone involved agrees it's a tragedy.
Now contrast that to the Paris attacks. These deaths weren't an accident or collateral damage. The fanatics intended to kill as many innocent civilians as possible. They would have killed more if they'd had the ability to do so.
And notice the difference in reactions. After the hospital bombing, no Americans celebrated in the streets. Even the most hawkish politicians expressed their sadness at the tragedy. If you read Obama's statement, it's nothing but apologetic.[2] Now read the Islamic State's statement on the Paris attacks.[3] They praise the attackers and promise more to come. The two sides cannot be more different. You should feel ashamed for your equivocation.
1. Screenshots of me trying to reply and failing: http://imgur.com/a/daFeB
2. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/10/03/state...
3. https://ent.siteintelgroup.com/Statements/is-claims-paris-at...
I agree, as was the US dropping the A Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Not even remotely reasonable" especially when the victims numbered in the tens of thousands. Innocent women and children included.
If anything, mass surveillance is to blame for lack of intel. Before spying was so ubiquitous, terrorists might have said something on the phone or by email.
It's known that governments have had plans as to how to get support from a tragedy if one happens. Is it that far fetched that preventing tragedies which are more likely but have a benefit to them for the government, would be considered at a somewhat lower priority than one which is less likely, but does not have any side benefit for the government?
Now, I'm not claiming that this is the case, not really, but it is something that comes to mind, and the most likely version of it does not seem that absurd?
(Which will of course do absolutely nothing at all to stop people from obtaining and using strong crypto.)
I guess it's new in the sense that it was applied to a particular attack, but that's not really a great reason to call it new. Good point.
However, I do think the minimal form of it I expressed in a way that seemed more likely than most of the time I see it?
As a practical matter of how this could occur, a small group of intelligence analysts could selectively withhold important information from decision makers, or decision makers could selectively ignore key pieces of information. Either can get you the result of allowing an attack while leaving plausible excuses as to why it wasn't deliberate.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/paris-attacks-raises-quest...
Blame encryption and omit the violent nature of Islam.
Surprisingly, you only need a few terrorists to change international laws and double those military budgets. Snowden or not, it's the virus that comes first and the anti-virus after. I don't think any mass surveillance program can stop such actions unless you become a militia state which I highly doubt (and hope not) will ever happen.
It's possible that the perpetrators evaded surveillance with encryption. It's also possible that the perpetrators did have their phones tapped, but investigators dropped the ball. It's possible that they avoided phones and did all their planning in person. It's even possible that someone made an executive decision to not intervene and stop them, for political reasons.
As far as I know, none of Snowden's criticisms have been addressed at French organizations. While there's some possibility US intelligence agencies could have picked up on this, it's primarily a European matter and not the NSA's responsibility. This makes Snowden's having undermined the NSA quite unlikely to have been relevant.
That's very misleading, as the law was just voted and isn't in application yet.
It's all quite tedious.
The name of the article calls for itself:
Dragon Slayer Becomes The New Dragon
https://medium.com/@durov/dragon-slayer-becomes-the-new-drag...
This is a false flag attack that serves a number of purposes. Slowing the push for encryption and generally boosting surveillance and domestic operations is one. As the western debt grows and the military position becomes thinner, it will become increasingly difficult to maintain the fiat that demands massive resource distribution imbalances. This will lead to serious shortages in western countries. In order to maintain power, the state turns its guns and spies inward.
But in the meantime the covert operations in Syria have not been completely successful, and since they need to do Syria before Iran (as has been planned for many years) they need to move to overt operations. This requires the propaganda to motivate it which needs a real event behind it.
Running an exit node is already a great way to end up in jail, and I would not have a warm fuzzy feeling about using tor for innocent traffic at this point, although it's perfectly legal.
Imagine how easily flagged users could be singled out if simply using crypto were a crime, and probable cause for search: e.g. you get caught using FDE on your phone or laptop at a traffic stop or the airport. Either your info is trivially purused at will by LE, or you've committed a crime by makeing it difficult and can be compelled on that basis. Either way, they're reading your mail if they feel like it.
The real value of this would be that almost no normal person would want to risk prosecution, so the overwhelming majority of user data could be easily mined. These are just a couple of crypto tools, but the technical details don't really matter here, I think this is a legal and social strategy that will generalize well, and it I think this is where we're inevitably headed.
We will have an extremely difficult time making all crypto illegal. Cryptography is crucial to important pieces of infrastructure we use for trust and security.
We may reach the point where certain implementation or tools are outlawed. In which case people with stuff to hide will piggyback it inside legal tools.
I suspect we will be more likely to see a combination of these approaches:
1) Forcing entities that sell products that provide encryption capabilities to maintain access for the government.
2) Pass laws that make it illegal to avoid or materially assist others in avoiding government surveillance without authorization
E.g. you can use SSL for commmerce, but it's got to "approved", in other words either technically, or organizationally backdoored.
Oh, idiot talking heads on TV news. Who cares?
If I wanted to know what idiots on TV think, I'd watch TV.
Much terrorism is an externality of Western foreign policy and a nation's abuse of it's citizens (domestic).
Whether Snowden or encryption enabled terrorism or not is TOTALLY missing or deflecting the real conversation that should be occurring. Do not fall into the trap of arguing. Ignore statements like OA. Instead ask "Why are people willing to kill themselves and others?" "What has France done / is doing so that people believe that is their best redress?" "Why do people become terrorists?". Most import of all (and the only way we will end terrorism). "How can we change the world so less people are compelled to such drastic action?"
However, I think this features far too prominently in a lot of people's outlooks than it should. Nothing, including terrorism is born in a vacuum but I don't think American involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts is the primary cause. Various Tsarist policies at the turn of the century are responsible for the conditions that gave rise to revolutionary communism in Russia, but communism was a greater force than Tsarist policies.
We are talking about a spectrum of religious-nationalist beliefs that are turning other wars, conflicts, slights, frustrations, rivalries and any other available fuel and putting it to use. This includes American policies in Iraq. They are fuelling it, but I really do not think they are creating it.